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Elder Stories
Maggie One Bear: Chief Dull Knife's Cheyenne Granddaughter
by Calvin Ve'kese hema'evo Wilson and Renee Sansom Flood
Maggie One Bear |
My relationship with Maggie One Bear, the last surviving granddaughter of Chief Dull Knife or Wohehiv the 'Morning Star,' began in 1977. One night I drove by the Lame Deer Trading Post and saw a Cheyenne girl scrubbing the floor. I said to myself, look how hard she's working and she's so beautiful!
Her name was Roxanna One Bear and she was an orphan living with her grandparents, James and Maggie One Bear. The young beauty was a senior in high school working to save money to go to college. The next day, dressed in my best cowboy shirt, I went to the trading post and bought a Snickers Bar with a dollar, knowing she would have to give me change. When she gave me the coins, I could kind of touch her hand for a second.
I went back every day and bought a lot of Snickers! She was so aloof and shy that I was going in there 4 or 5 times a day before she would even look at me. She was living with her Grandma Maggie in a little frame place, the first house in Lame Deer with electricity. My home at the time was my grandmother's bunk house on our family ranch. I knew that dating "Roxie" without doing it the old way, by asking her family, was going to be impossible.
Roxie and I fell in love but when it came time to ask for her hand in marriage, I had to visit with her brother and eventually with her Grandma Maggie, a well known woman in the community. For some reason, I thought this was going to be easy. I told her brother Terry my plan to marry his sister and he turned me down! Talk about being humbled. Here I was – the first practicing Northern Cheyenne lawyer to graduate with a law degree. I had a good job with my tribe but that didn't mean a thing to this honored, traditional family. The Cheyenne have always been cautious and I had to prove myself worthy.
It took some begging before Grandma Maggie allowed me to marry Roxie. Two years passed before they finally gave us their blessing! After Roxie and I married, we were often blessed to be in Grandma Maggie's presence. The "old woman," as she was affectionately called by her husband, almost never smiled but her people knew her to be a compassionate woman with great strength of character and moral values, a peacemaker who proudly carried on her grandfather's legacy.
Maggie was born near Kirby, Montana in 1903, the daughter of Jule Seminole, a Cheyenne interpreter for the tribe. Her mother was Mary Dull Knife, the daughter of Chief Dull Knife. Jule Seminole wanted all of his children to get an education. One day, when Maggie was about 6 years old, a wagon pulled up and she and her older sister left home to attend the Riggs Institute at Flandreau, (now known as Flandreau Indian School) on the eastern boundary of South Dakota. They might as well have traveled to the end of the world - and only one of the girls would ever see her family again.
The institute was one of the most modern Indian Schools in the nation, named for the Rev. Stephan R. Riggs, a Presbyterian missionary among the Indians. Maggie and her sister, sitting in the back of a wagon, went over a steel bridge spanning the winding Sioux River and the two frightened Cheyenne girls saw 16 large Victorian brick and frame buildings looming in the distance.
Life at the school was regimented by bells. Bells called the students to hurry and get up, hurry to class, hurry to work and hurry to bed. Maggie and her sister didn't speak English and they were forbidden to speak in Cheyenne or to talk in Indian sign language. From the beginning, Maggie and her sister suffered from an empty, homesick feeling for their family back in Montana. As another Cheyenne student put it, "Walk, walk, walk, that's all we did. We marched everywhere! It was just like an army camp." Their moccasins were taken away and they wore tight, itchy uniforms and hard, laced up shoes.
But Maggie's boarding school days at Riggs Institute ended in personal tragedy. "Grandma told me that her older sister died at that school but they wouldn't even let her see her sister. The family was devastated." Roxie recalls. When Chief Dull Knife's daughter and husband Jule Seminole came to get their dead child, Jule told the headmaster, "You are not going to kill any more of our children!" In deep mourning, they took Maggie and her sister home to the pine hills of Montana. Maggie never forgot this terrible loss. She later finished her schooling at the Government School at Busby, near her home.
In 1921, when the sheltered girl was 18 years old, Maggie married James One Bear and they made their home on a ranch on Rosebud Creek. Despite an era of extreme poverty and malnutrition, well documented in government records as "criminal neglect" by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Maggie and James had survived the Spanish Influenza that had killed hundreds of Cheyenne people, mostly children and the elderly. But by the mid-1920s, typhoid fever, cholera, diphtheria and the dreaded tuberculosis had gained a foot hold on the reservation.
James kept a garden and Maggie canned vegetables and dried wild turnips. They camped out on the Yellowstone River and hoed sugar beets and helped in the harvesting of green bean and beets throughout Wyoming and Montana. Years later, she described the food she prepared for her family during those hard times. "We ate berries and sometimes porcupine, deer and horse meat. It was all dried to keep during hot or cold weather. Some people ate deer and cow livers and hearts raw." Little children licked the sap from box elder trees and chewed the bark. In those days, the water from streams was clean and as in ancient times up to the present day, the Cheyenne left prayer cloths at fresh springs to thank Maheo, Creator God, for the life-giving water that He had provided during one the worst decades of famine and poverty in Northern Cheyenne history.
James and Maggie were happily married but there were no open displays of affection and hugging. The One Bears raised Roxie and her brother Terry and Roxie affectionately called her grandpa, "Oy Oy." She remembers that "Even though they had beds, Grandma and Oy Oy slept on blankets and quilts on the floor. The old people didn't talk about relationships between men and women and personal things. Grandma always told me, "'Be good. People are watching us.'"
A personal friend of Maggie's, the wife of a Chief of the Northern Cheyenne Council of 44, described the strict rules followed by the female members of a chief's family:
If you are a chief's daughter or wife, then you live according to the chiefs' rules. You have to live a clean life. You are watched to see how you are living. Anybody who comes to your house, feed them, even if you are left with no food. You should not gossip or listen to gossip! Be kind to all people and control your temper. You will make a trail that others will surely follow.
Roxie's grandmother learned these rules from her mother, Mary Dull Knife. From Chief Dull Knife's daughter the old stories and teachings were passed down to Maggie and then to Roxie. But Maggie was also a jokester. She made up the funniest things on the spur of the moment that would cause hysterical laughter. She told jokes with a poker face and when she laughed, her shoulders went up and down but her face remained stoic. She never laughed loudly but she made fun of herself and it made people laugh and happy to be with her.
Maggie's friend, Virginia Toews, recalls that "Maggie's face, deeply wrinkled, showed that she had worked hard for many years but she loved life! She taught me to laugh at myself and my mistakes instead of dwelling on them That was an important lesson. Maggie had a certain regal way she carried herself and she was full of vitality in spite of her age."
Virginia had been trying for years to improve the substandard housing conditions on the reservation. In 1961, Maggie and James wanted a better home. They came into Virginia's office and the interpreter, Joe Walks Along, explained what a newer frame house would be like. Virginia told him there would be running water and James asked the interpreter, "Where is the water coming from and where is it going?" Joe and Virginia tried to explain the plumbing system. Maggie sat quietly by her husband's side, although she spoke well in English.
Virginia remembers that she told the couple the house would have an indoor bathroom. "What! Jim said. "You are going to put a toilet inside the house! Are you crazy?" Virginia tried to explain the word "flushing" but James asked, "Can you take the bathroom out of the house?" She told him that wasn't possible. James was horrified! "No! No! No!" he said and he got up and Maggie followed him out. Maggie did not complain in public to humiliate her husband. Cheyenne men were private and modest and it did not make sense to James, who was a tidy person, to have such an unclean room inside his house.
The inside walls of their small, old home in Lame Deer were painted blue, a traditional Cheyenne color. Maggie kept her house immaculately clean, despite many grandchildren coming and going. Her pot bellied stove warmed the house and she cooked on an old, black woodstove. James had built the outhouse far in back and away from their home.
Maggie successfully blended her traditional beliefs in the Sundance and sweat lodge ceremonies with the Mennonite religion. Every morning she rose at dawn with her medicine bundle and went out on the front porch, faced east and prayed to God, "Maheo." During the day, when she was cooking, sewing or cleaning, she would stop what she was doing and pray out loud. She faithfully attended Mennonite meetings and had them in her home.
Maggie's strong faith helped her through the death of half of her 12 children. Each time an adult child died from disease or an accident, Maggie moved out of the house and into another and gave away all personal belongings. Finally, in 1974, James One Bear, her husband of 53 years, passed away. "I thought she was going to die," Roxie remembers. "Her hair was so long she could sit on it, but when Grandpa died, she took a knife and cut off her hair to the shoulders, left it raggedy and wore a black scarf and black clothes. When I left for school in the morning she was crying and when I came home, she was sitting on the porch crying."
Virginia, a white woman, sat with Maggie after her husband passed and they prayed together. "When Maggie prayed," Virginia remembers, "she touched the heart of God and love radiated from her. She enveloped me. The communion of spirit and prayer between us – there are no words to describe that sweet fellowship. She experienced terrible tragedies in her life, but Maggie never gave up hope."
After her husband's death, Maggie's devotion to her many grandchildren kept her going. She counseled for tribal reconciliation and upheld the traditional customs of her family while accepting the new. She remained an active member of the Lame Deer Mennonite Church and also enjoyed Indian dancing at powwows well into her 80s. Her house was always open to everyone.
Maggie never had much money but she was rich in love and wisdom. In her last days she held a family meeting in which she expressed her grandfather's legacy of non-violence and reconciliation. She listened while visitors compared Chief Dull Knife to Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, men like the Cheyenne chief who had led their people through terrible hardships and unbearable conditions.
When Maggie was 83 years old, her family took turns caring for their gentle matriarch. "I know I'm going to live again," she told her family. "I'm going to have a new life." A week or so before she died, Grandma Maggie held Roxie's hand and told her, "I can die in peace knowing that Calvin will be taking care of you."
In her soft-spoken way, Maggie carried on the dignified legacy of her grandfather as described by the Santee Sioux physician and author, Charles A. Eastman: "Dull Knife, the Cheyenne is . . . devoid of selfish aims, or love of gain, he is a pattern for heroes of any race."
Maggie One Bear died October 8, 1986, when the golden aspen and cottonwood leaves covered the hills of her beloved reservation. Before she was gently placed into the earth, Maggie's face was painted with sacred red paint and the Chief's honor song carried away the spirit of the last traditional granddaughter of Chief Dull Knife to join her relatives in their ancestral homeland.
